The Second Coming - thoughts on the Republican resurgence

A year ago we were in Washington for the inauguration honeymoon.  The atmosphere was of harmony and hope.  Now we have a voter rebellion taking from the Democrats the seat that Ted Kennedy held .  Massachusetts - which Obama  captured  by 26 % a year ago!  Stung by a guy who posed nude in Cosmo, who has a pickup truck, and thinks waterboarding is OK.  The knots in my stomach are tight.  Torn between blaming the voters, the candidate, and the President for not knowing how to be a populist in a populist moment.

Barack Obama is a conciliator.  That has been clear from the first.  The hope was that his thoughtfulness could transform the atmosphere.  Even I joined that hope - though I expected he would be subject to the same kind of vicious attacks as Bill and Hillary suffered.  And they came.

Obama’s instinct to compromise has hobbled him.  He wanted to be practical - so he didn’t ask for too much.  But anything was too much for a Republican Party that reminds me of  Yeats.  The center cannot hold, the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.



TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 


William Butler Yeats